I, of course, don't have a notebook. I suddenly feel like I'm standing naked in the middle of the street. The weird thing is that they've all got the same notebook. I mean, all right, there's the standard police issue, but there's more than one notebook in the police service, and there's usually someone brings something a little idiosyncratic to the table. It's like some weird satanic worship thing where I'm the only one not involved.
'They're sure now that Tucker died first,' says Morrow. 'Quite possibly as much as an hour before the others.'
'So the journalist didn't suffer too much...' says Taylor ruefully. Dark, but well said.
'Relatively speaking, no. The other two both showed signs of surviving much longer, and with much greater brain degradation, before they died.'
Man, that's one of those situations where you're going to just hope that you go quickly, isn't it? Sometimes you're going to want to hang on as long as possible – say for example, if you're dying while Scotland are playing Brazil in the World Cup Final – and sometimes you're going to just want to fucking peg it.
Maybe they clung on, their nerves twitching and bodily functions failing, in the hope that they'd be found. That they'd get to live on, live another day, live out their days in a quiet suburb, watching daytime television and visiting their therapist.
'Anything else?' asks Taylor.
'They're keen to point out the quality of the workmanship. They got a brain guy in from the Western to take a look, and he said the work was done with surgical precision.'
'So do we think we're looking for a brain surgeon?'
'Not necessarily. It wasn't as if the bloke performed surgery on the brains. He was just a dab hand at removing an area of the skull without inducing fatal bleeding. He could have practiced on animals. And maybe on humans. I did wonder if there were missing persons that he might be responsible for, where he practiced his craft before going public.'
Taylor stares at him for a second, then looks at the floor. Thinking it over. That's a decent thought from Morrow, but it's a tough one to move on. Does he put one of his officers on something that might be a complete waste of time? Where would you start?
Well, with a list of missing persons obviously.
'Give it a go,' said Taylor. 'Yep, you know, don't spend a week on it or anything, but just stick your toe in the water.'
'Yes, Sir.'
'Constable Grant, you help him out. It'll be one of those you'll-know–it-when-you-find-it things.'
'I'm used to that,' says Morrow, immediately shaking his head at the comment.
Taylor ignores it, glances around the room. Eyes settle on DI Gostkowski. When she says her name, she still pronounces the w as a v, so it can't be too long since her family left eastern Europe, although there's no trace of an accent. She's the number two here, and he hasn't referenced her yet. Wonder what he's had her working on.
She was brought in to replace Leander because, when he was finally able to return to work, he didn't want to come back here. Thought everyone would be talking about him. Which they were. He was packed off to the other side of the city. Just as well, or it would have been me being packed off to the other side of the city.
'Stephanie, how's it looking on possible revenge motives?'
She manages to talk without looking at her notebook. That's the talent that comes with being higher up the pay scale.
'Blank,' she says. 'Sergeant Goodwin... well, you don't know what kind of petty grudge people are going to bear, but there's really nothing there. A regular policeman's life...' She shakes her head. This time she does glance at her notebook, although she's not actually looking at it. 'A regular police officer's life, no stand-out cases. Recently he's been spending a lot of time going round schools, speaking to youth groups.'
'If this is revenge, it's old, been a long time in the planning,' says Taylor.
'I know. It's hard to imagine that any of the people he's arrested over the years would want to do anything other than put a brick through his car window.'
'All right. Tucker. He's a journalist. He must have fucked someone off. I'm fucked off at him and I'd never even heard of him...'
She answers without any trace of the black humour that Taylor has just introduced into the conversation. I start to drift away, crossing her off the list as I go.
Did I say list?
She's too ... I don't know... serious is probably the word. She's a grown-up. You know the sort. Has that air of humourless responsibility about her. You can imagine she's been this way since she was eight. Then later, when all her friends were doing standard teenage things, like getting drunk and listening to indie bands and smoking weird shit and getting annoyed at things that happened a hundred years ago and being outraged at that year's genocide, she was looking disdainfully upon it all and writing in her diary the precise plan of how she was going to become Chief Constable of the Met by the time she was forty-seven. And a half. Marry George. Take two months off to have a child. Harry or Imogen. She probably had the kid signed up to the nursery school of her choice even before she met George.
No, I don't want to get involved with DI Gostkowski. And given the events that led her to be posted here in the first place, it's probably a good idea to leave well alone.
She's still talking.
With Sergeant Harrison being as interested in women as I am, that pretty much leaves Constable Corrigan and Sergeant Jones. Don't know either of them particularly well. They don't usually get dragged into this kind of shit, but it's obviously all hands to the deck. Corrigan looks like she's barely out of school. Really not a great idea for me to be hitting on girls that are damned near twenty-five years younger than me anymore.
Which leaves Sgt Jones. Bobbed blonde hair. Bit of a, I don't know, thirtysomething policewoman cut. And she's young enough amongst our lot to still be pretty fit. Slim. Not bad looking. I don't think I'd be over-snagging. Just need to overcome the fact that she'll know all about me and will more than likely not want anything to do with me.
DI Gostkowski is still talking. I like to think I've heard enough to make a judgement in the case, thereby excusing myself from listening.
Wonder what Jones is doing after work.
6
'What d'you think?'
Taylor and I are sitting in the pub. Our usual. Not the Whale, where the rest of the gang are likely to be, if they're at the pub at all. The younger police officer tends to spend less time in the pub and more time at the gym. Fuck's sake. Of course, I'm banned from the Whale, so it's not as though it's an option. Shouldn't have gone there in the first place.
'For the moment, you're fucked,' I say.
First vodka and tonic in a long time. Since the Leander thing. God it feels good. Crisp and cold and fresh, and perfect on a warm summer's day. There's something to be said for living on the side of a mountain being a Buddhist monk, but not as much as there is to be said for a crisp, cold vodka tonic.
'You're forgetting you're back on the team, Sergeant. You mean, we're fucked, not you're fucked.'
'I stand corrected, Sir,' I say, acknowledging him with a small movement of the glass.
Taylor looks pissed off, takes another sip from his pint, glances around the bar. There's football on the TV. Never seems right in early August. For me the football season doesn't really get going properly until it's pishing down, freezing cold, and the Thistle are playing against Cowdenbeath in a mudpit.
'Care to elaborate?' he says. 'I didn't bring you off the substitutes bench to state the bloody obvious.'
OK. Still getting back into the groove.
'Everything about this says planning. Planning to the absolute nth detail. A perfectly executed crime. This is a scary fucking guy. None of your drunk aggressive, not even your psycho, can't-keep-his-knife-to-himself type. This is cold and devious. This is... you know, it's the equivalent of the German death camps against the Rwandan thing. Rwanda, a bunch of guys with machetes going about their business, making no attempt to cover up what they did. It was bru
tal, nasty, vicious. There was no artifice. The Germans. They burnt bodies, they dug deep graves, they used camps and then tore them down when the Russians closed in. They had a system. They systematically murdered. And that's what this guy is doing. He has a system. He's going to do the same thing again. We have no idea when that'll be, but he knows exactly when. Exactly.'
Taylor is looking at me while I talk. Face expressionless. I know it's why I'm here. To say what he already knows.
'And worse than that,' I continue, 'he'll already know who he's going to kill, and they won't have any idea. Maybe he's already taken them.'
'We should be looking for missing persons,' says Taylor. 'And not the usual kind, the seventeen–year-olds, the ones who'll have gone out on the piss and ended up on the bus to Aberdeen or in the wrong person's bed.'
'If he really didn't know the three victims and he selected them at random, then we're about to find out if he just selected any old person or whether he has a gripe against these professions. Did he choose social worker, policeman and journalist for a reason, or might it just as likely have been butcher, baker, candlestick maker?'
'We need to get ahead of the game,' says Taylor.
'We always do.'
'So we start by establishing if any police officers have gone missing in the last day or two, because the way he carried out that first murder, he must have grabbed the victims some time before they died. There had to be a gap.'
'Were any of them reported missing?'
Taylor stares at me for a second than shakes his head, drops his eyes.
'He had that covered as well. None of them were missed.'
'Why?'
'A combination of things, and it all points to the fact that this was immaculately planned. Either they lived alone, or the ones who didn't had time off work previously planned. They had arranged to go away. It was... it was like he was inside their lives, knew what they were doing, knew that he could secret them away and nobody would notice. How do we counteract that?'
'He was doing it online? Facebook, that kind of shit?'
He stares at me again. 'You weren't paying attention at the briefing, were you?'
Look a bit sheepish.
'Fuck, Sergeant, head in the game. The next time you're in the same room as a bunch of women, stop trying to work out which one you want to sleep with.'
Hide behind my drink. No one likes to get read like a damned book.
'We're checking it out, but we've found nothing so far.'
'So, realistically, we're not going to know if there are any officers missing?' I ask, to move the conversation on from Facebook.
'No.'
'What do we do about that, then?'
He takes a long drink. Drags his hand across his face.
'If it was just the one station, if we knew it was on our patch, we could introduce a system... I don't know, a checking-in system, a buddy system... But shit, we can't city-wide. And what do we know? Maybe it's country-wide. Maybe the next one'll be in the south of England. Or in France. This level of planning, how in the name of God are we supposed to know?'
V&t to my lips. Getting near the end, and it's losing a little of its crispness. Clearly I'm going to need another one.
'He knows,' I say.
Taylor drains his pint and places it on the table. He looks into it as the last of the froth hugs the side of the glass and slides down.
SECOND NIGHT BACK AT home. Already changed the sheets, did a bit of a tidy. Glad I did it yesterday, as I've already reverted to where I was four months ago. The weeks of clean living and communing with the Gods of the Scottish highlands have gone. I woke up yesterday morning at the foot of a mountain. This evening it feels like a hundred years ago.
Brought a prostitute home with me. I know. Filthy. Picked her up in town. Had to drive on the back of four v&ts to go and find her. No hookers on the streets of Cambuslang and Rutherglen anymore.
She wanted to do it in the car. I wanted her to come back to my place. She refused, which is quite right of course. These people are mental if they go home with anyone. Being a bit pissed, I showed her my badge. She still refused, but at least began to enter into negotiations. I paid through the nose in the end. She wouldn't come until I'd gone to a cash point and got several hundred. It's just sweetie money to me at the moment, because I've got four months wages in there that I've hardly spent.
Back to my place. I made her shower first. Didn't ask how many she'd scored earlier in the evening, didn't want to know. I was gallant enough to shower too. After all that, it was worth it. Every penny. Great tongue on her, absolutely beautiful body, she had the decency to try to earn her money and got stuck into it. Great fun.
A fair compensation for feeling like a complete and total loser for having to go to her in the first place.
Called her a cab, then fell asleep as soon as she was gone. The door was locked and I knew she wouldn't be coming back.
WENT TO SEE BOB THE next night. He didn't disappoint. Not that he ever does. He disappoints some people, of course. The nostalgia brigade, not the fans. The kind of people that go and watch Cliff Fucking Richard and McCartney, the Rolling Stones even. They go along to hear Hey Jude and Livin' Doll and Jumpin' Jack Flash, expecting it to sound exactly like it does on their Best of The '60s CD, and by fuck, sure enough those guys are still peddling the same shit and still managing to sound exactly like they did in 1965.
Bob doesn't sound like he did in 1965. His voice is completely shot. Anyway, it wouldn't matter, because he changes the arrangements all the time, and these sad fuckers go along thinking that he'll walk on stage with his acoustic guitar and start warbling his way through Blowin' In The Wind; well he'll do you Blowin' In The Wind often enough, but it'll be with a full band and a completely different tune, if it's even got a tune, and to the uninitiated he'll be halfway through before they pick up a line they recognise, then they think, fuck me, this is shit, what a waste of £75, and they'll storm out and if they can find someone to tell how shit they thought it was they'll do so.
That lot, those people, they can take a fuck to themselves. Bob owes you nothing.
November
7
The games involving the Old Firm got a bit nasty at the weekend. Clyde pitched up at Ibrox on Saturday, and a few of their fans thought it might be fun to have a go at the Scottish lower division superpower. It was brief but nasty. I mean, seriously. Fucking Clyde. The Sunday Mail said that parts of Govan looked like Aleppo, which was just incredibly stupid, not to mention completely inaccurate.
Then, in the interests of even-handedness, some Aberdeen fans got the bug on Sunday, and rocked up at Parkhead looking for a fight, and a little of that spilled out our way, although by then I don't think they were Aberdeen fans, just drunk guys who thought they'd get into a fight because everyone else was. A few injuries, but they all got what they deserved.
Sure, every now and again you'll get an innocent walking down the street who stumbles into a gang of orcs and gets the complete fuck kicked out of him. I might occasionally feel some sympathy for that guy. If he exists. As long as he's not wearing a scarf or a strip, in which case, what did he think was going to happen?
Most of them go looking for it, though. They're looking for the fight, expecting to win in the first place or, failing that, expecting the emergency services to clear up after them. Generally, I think we should just let them bleed. You want to fight for whatever dumb-ass cause you think it is you're protecting, then on you go, but don't expect the rest of society to clean up the mess for you.
Some might argue that the same should apply to people who smoke and drink too much, and end up draining the NHS of all its funds. The healthy living are supporting the rest of us hard-living chaps. Maybe those folks would be right. I'm just hoping to peg it from some other cause before I get cancer and die a horribly protracted death, dragged out over several years with just my estranged family to pop in and see me once every few months.
Walking back upstairs after
a two-hour interview with a bloke who bricked another bloke in the head. The other bloke is in a coma. Our bloke is in custody. Not getting out any time soon, although personally I'd just let him go. Let him back to his feral homeland, where he might well be about to suffer much greater retribution than the courts will be able to visit upon him.
One of those lost generation types. Broken home. Abused as a child. Generally didn't go to school, left officially at sixteen with sod all to his name. Never worked. A child of the benefit system. He can afford his Ibrox season ticket though, albeit they're giving them away like sweeties these days.
That he lives out our way, and not on the other side, does not speak well for his chances. He's also got a self-defence defence as he was being chased. So, all in all, the usual thing. On the surface it looks a clear-cut case of a ned bricking another ned, and then you get into it and there's all sorts of subtext.
The summer seems a long time ago, but sometimes I look back fondly on my days sitting on the side of Ben Ime, watching old people trudge by and Tornadoes low-flying and clouds coming in from the west. Happy days.
There's talk of a redundancy round coming up. They'll be looking for volunteers. I'll need to do the maths. The other side of the coin, the side where one doesn't take redundancy, is that there ain't going to be any less crime committed, but there will be fewer officers around to do anything about it.
To be honest, the lump sum on offer is going to have to be pretty fucking low for me not to go for it. But then, there's a damned good chance that the lump sum on offer will be pretty fucking low.
Back to my desk. The paperwork seems to have grown in my absence. That was one of those things that got mentioned in my annual report. It was made part of my objectives. Deal with paperwork in a more timely and organised manner. I even said that I'd do it. I've now had to add that I'll try not to get into fights with anyone from the station, so I've been concentrating on that one. The paperwork thing has slipped.
DS Hutton Box Set Page 28
